Jamal Saeed.Rufaida al-Khabbaz/Supplied
Books on the Syrian civil war, Blackness, murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, motherhood and a colossal wildfire comprise the shortlist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, announced on Wednesday.
Already one of the most lucrative awards of its kind in Canada, the prizewinner’s purse has been bumped up to $75,000 from $60,000 starting this year.
The five nominated authors include Jamal Saeed, who was recognized for his memoir, My Road from Damascus, translated by Scotland’s Catherine Cobham. Saeed spent 12 years as a prisoner of conscience in Syria before being invited to Canada in 2016. He lives in Kingston.
Christina Sharpe.Supplied
Scholar Christina Sharpe, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at Toronto’s York University, made the shortlist for Ordinary Notes, about loss, racism and the varieties of Black life.
Angela Sterritt is a CBC Vancouver journalist and first-time author who, in her memoir Unbroken, investigated the effect of colonialism on the societal devaluation of Indigenous people.
Angela Sterritt.Supplied
Emily Urquhart uses her skills as a journalist and folklorist to explore childhood, motherhood and daughterhood In her collection Ordinary Wonder Tales – noted in The Globe and Mail as “non-fiction that hums with truth and life.” Based in Kitchener, Ont., she is the daughter of novelist Jane Urquhart and the late painter Tony Urquhart.
Emily Urquhart.Andrew Trant/Supplied
The final nominee is Vancouver-based John Vaillant, who won the Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize (and the Governor-General’s Award) for 2005′s The Golden Spruce. His latest, Fire Weather, is an account of the wildfire that overran Alberta’s Fort McMurray in 2016.
A jury composed of Canadian non-fiction writers Eve Joseph, Michelle Porter and last year’s winner Dan Werb arrived at the shortlist after considering 99 titles submitted by 55 publishing imprints. Each finalist receives $5,000; the winner receives an additional $70,000. (Translators receive a portion of the prize money.)
The shortlisted books are, in the opinion of the jury, the year’s best works of Canadian non-fiction and demonstrate a distinctive voice as well as a persuasive and compelling command of tone, narrative, style and technique. The prize winner will be announced on Nov. 21 at a ceremony hosted at CBC’s Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto.
A year ago, Werb, an epidemiologist and former musician, won for The Invisible Siege: The Rise of Coronaviruses and the Search for a Cure. Other recent winners include Tomson Highway, Jessica J. Lee, Jenny Heijun Wills, Elizabeth Hay, James Maskalyk, Deborah Campbell, Rosemary Sullivan and Naomi Klein.
John Vaillant.Supplied
The Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize has a sister $75,000 award, the Weston International Award for career achievement in non-fiction, which is new this year. Both prizes are presented by the Writers’ Trust of Canada and supported by the Toronto-based Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation.
British author Robert Macfarlane, winner of the inaugural Weston International Award earlier this summer, spoke at an event in his honour at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto on Monday.